7c. Take a lean approach to notifications and documents
Notifications, such as emails or text messages, have a carbon footprint. The same applies to any documentation that a service might produce. There are however approaches we can take to reduce these environmental costs.
Lead Roles
Interaction designer, developer, content designer
Sub-actions
7c. (i) Take a lean approach to notifications
7c. (ii) Choose lightweight publishing formats
(i) Take a lean approach to notifications
Notifications like emails have a carbon footprint. This can increase when they have attachments. For services with many users these impacts can quickly mount.
Take a lean approach to notifications by:
• Only sending emails, SMS, website and other notifications when genuinely needed
• Keeping notifications as lightweight (as small a file size) as possible
• Setting up notifications so users can turn them off or choose how often to receive them.
Environmental benefit:
These approaches can help reduce data transfer and associated energy consumption.
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(ii) Choose lightweight publishing formats
Choices of format for documents can impact file sizes and data transfer. For example, the HTML publishing format has lower file sizes than PDFs.
Environmental benefit:
Using smaller documents sizes mean less data transfer and energy use.